Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

“Yes,” Vladimir said, and his voice was clearer now too. “It’s Vladimir Alexandrovich Morozov.”

“And can you tell me how you knew Lana Vishnyeva?”

“We were friends. Friends since primary. And her best friend is my girlfriend.”

“Your girlfriend’s name for the record?”

“Aksinya Stepanova.”

“And where were you on the night of the twenty-third of January?”

There was a pause. “Which night is that?” Vladimir said.

A note of annoyance crept into Dmitri’s voice. “The night Lana was murdered.”

“Aksinya wasn’t with me,” Vladimir said.

“OK,” Dmitri said. “Who was with you? Lana?”

“Yes. Lana,” Vladimir said.

“And,” Dmitri said. The annoyance had ceded to encouragement.

“I killed her,” Vladimir said.

There it was. He’d said it. And just as Ilya was beginning to wonder if that was the message, if this was Vladimir’s way of saying that he’d done it, no matter what Ilya believed, Dmitri asked, “How?”

“With a knife,” Vladimir said. “I stabbed her.”

“You mean you cut her throat? It was Yulia Podtochina and Olga Nadiova that you stabbed.”

“Oh,” Vladimir said. “OK. I cut her throat.”

“Where did you get the knife?”

“A store,” Vladimir said.

“You don’t remember which one?” There was a pause, and then Dmitri said, “I need you to make a verbal answer.”

“No,” Vladimir said.

“And what did you do with it after you stabbed Lana?”

There was another pause. Dmitri cleared his throat. It was a tic of his, Ilya remembered, from that dinner at the Malikovs’ apartment.

“I threw it off the Bolshoi Bridge, into the river.”

“Walk me through the whole night,” Dmitri said. “When did you meet up with Lana?”

Vladimir began to talk again, but Ilya was picturing him up on the Bolshoi Bridge. It had been the thick of winter when Lana was murdered, and the river was frozen solid. Nothing could be thrown into it.

The whole confession was like that—Vladimir making missteps and Dmitri correcting those he caught. Vladimir got the location of Olga Nadiova’s murder wrong. He described a struggle with Lana, though the newspaper had reported no signs of a struggle after her autopsy. He guessed wildly at the number of times he’d stabbed Yulia Podtochina, and Dmitri said quietly, “Try again,” and then, “Again.”

By the end of the confession, Vladimir’s voice had gone hoarse and thick.

“Why did you do it?” Dmitri said.

“I don’t know,” Vladimir said.

“Because of the drugs?” Dmitri said.

“Because I felt like it,” Vladimir said. This had been a refrain of his for much of their adolescence. “Why did you break the window?” their mother would ask. Because I felt like it. “Why would you say that to her?” Because I felt like it . “Why did you steal the cigarettes?” Because I felt like it , and his mother would say, “How nice it must be to always act the way you feel.”

“OK,” Dmitri said. “Enough.”

There was a click, and Ilya waited a second for Michael and Stephanie to resume, but that was the end of Dmitri’s recording, not Vladimir’s.

“So the deal,” Vladimir said. “This confession and Ilya gets to go, and not just for a year. I want him to stay there. A permanent exchange.”

“Yes,” Dmitri said. “That’s the deal.”

“And the murders?” Vladimir said. “What if there are more murders?”

“I’ll make sure there are not,” Dmitri said. “Maybe prison will be good for you. At least you won’t lose any other limbs.”

“Can I have a minute—for a cigarette?” The recording was threaded through with static, but still Ilya could hear a new clarity, or force, in Vladimir’s voice here, as though this question were the only thing he’d said that mattered.

Dmitri didn’t seem to notice. He scoffed and said, “Take five if you like.”

His footsteps faded, and the muffled sound returned—the microphone against bedsheets. There were footsteps again, and then a woman’s voice said, “Hurry up,” and Ilya understood why the question had mattered. The tape clicked. For a moment there was silence, pure silence, the kind you’d hear in outer space, between worlds. Then Stephanie’s voice replied to something Michael had said, and Ilya could picture Vladimir, stuffing the tape player back into the pink plastic bag and handing it to the nurse, whose courage hadn’t yet deserted her, and she’d hidden it somewhere—in a wastebasket, or a food cart, or a bundle of dirty bedding—while Dmitri took Vladimir away in handcuffs.

Ilya remembered standing in the square with Vladimir after the Tower, after he’d admitted to skipping the boards. His cheek stinging from Vladimir’s slap. Snow melting fast on him like anger was heat. Vladimir had said he’d take care of things, and Ilya hadn’t believed him, hadn’t thought him capable. But this was Vladimir taking care of things. It was idiotic, terrible. It was amazing. It was Vladimir.

Vladimir hadn’t known that Maria Mikhailovna had taken the boards for Ilya, and he hadn’t had anything to barter with except for his terrible reputation, so he’d become Dmitri’s fall guy. But did that mean that Dmitri had done it? How else could he ensure that there were no more murders? Or would he just make sure that any more murders weren’t connected to the original three? Surely if Dmitri had been killing the girls, Vladimir would have hinted at that in the tapes?

Ilya didn’t know. He could see Dmitri Malikov over dinner, with a snifter of vodka in hand, talking about the Tower, about the people who went there like they were an infestation. Ilya thought of Maria Mikhailovna. Her thick braids. Her glasses. The way that she looked at him sometimes as though he were a work of art that she was grateful to have framed. And then he thought of Vladimir. He imagined Vladimir strutting out of the prison gates like he owned the whole world. If he got out, his smugness would be intolerable. “They should make a movie of me,” he’d say. “A whole fucking series. I’m like the love child of Jason Bourne and Jackie Chan.” Ilya could feel a smile on his face. The big, hurting kind, like the one he’d had in that picture in the Tower.

Ilya called Maria Mikhailovna from the phone in the kitchen. The house was empty except for Durashka, who was staring out the sliding glass door at a bird perched on the deck railing. Somehow Maria Mikhailovna must have known that it was him, because when she picked up, she said his name instead of “Hello.”

“Zdravstvuyte,” he said.

“Why are you talking to me in Russian? I want to hear your English! All those Americanisms! They haven’t corrupted your grammar, have they?” The excitement in her voice was almost enough to make him hang up, but the tape was in his hand. He had the sense that if he let it out of his grasp it might disappear, and it was sickening to him how light and small it felt, given how much it contained: the ridiculous confession, the months Vladimir had spent in prison and all the miseries that must have entailed.

She said his name again, cautiously this time, as though she could sense his anger fortifying. Then she switched to Russian and said, “Are you all right? What is it? Are they mean to you, the family? Tell me.” Ilya thought of Mama Jamie and the way her face relaxed when she prayed, of the way she held Molly sometimes and stroked the hair back from her forehead, of the notes she left in his lunch bag, each one signed with a string of X s and O s.

“Nyet,” he managed.

She said, “Is it Vladimir? Is he OK?”